Program Design: Building Applications out of Several Programs

Prerequisites

This course is part of the Scientific Computing series.

This is an introduction to when and how to combine separate programs together to form an application, and when and how to split a single program apart. It will concentrate on principles rather than details, to help attendees make the right decision and proceed in the right direction. It is aimed at users with some programming experience who need to start or join a significant programming project.

Some experience with writing significant programs (a few hundred lines or more), preferably under some variant of Unix.

Number of sessions: 1

• When and why to build applications out of multiple programs
• When and why to split programs
• Graphical interfaces and batch schedulers
• Techniques for linking programs together
• Passing data between programs
• Diagnostics and handling errors
• Importing and exporting data

A presentation, followed by questions and discussions.

• The principles are equally applicable to Microsoft Windows and most other systems, but the course will be in terms of Unix. Attendees should know enough Unix to understand its concepts and terminology.
• More information may be found in http://www-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/courses/MultiApplics

One half-day session.